With Blade: Trinity, at least everybody knows it's a joke. The vampire hunter with a thing for scarlet-lined leather trenchcoats and scalp tattoos isn't worth taking seriously. So they saddle Orlando's own Wesley with the comic Ryan Reynolds, wildest of the Van Wilder boys. He jokes and jokes again. Because he's in a gang of vampire killers that wants to help Blade stop the bloodsuckers, once and for all.

"We were gonna go with Care Bears," Reynolds quips. "But that was taken."

So was Night Stalker, bright boy. But that was pre-Buffy. You wouldn't remember.

Blade is trapped by a new brood of vampires that uses its black helicopters to awaken the original Dracula (Dominic Purcell), to regenerate the race and create some sort of "vampire final solution."

No fooling.

The Night Stalkers, led by King (Reynolds) and Abigail Whistler (a bow-wielding Jessica Biel), help Blade escape. That's good, because Blade's mentor, Whistler (Kris Kristofferson), won't be around to help him forever. Now, he's got Whistler's daughter. Whistler's Mother, we hope, is still in the Musee d'Orsay in Paris, but never mind.

Whatever Blade screenwriter David Goyer was able to pump out of the comic book that this sprang from, the bloodstream is dry. Promoted to writer-director, Goyer plays what's left of this for cold-blooded laughs -- Reynolds liquidating and wise-cracking, Posey shrieking her vampire put-downs, Snipes spitting out tough-guy talk, profanity and a funny Bush joke.

It's all about the gags and the gadgets and the body count, with shootings, impalings and explosions vaporizing every vamp in sight. Snipes still plays it straight. But Reynolds is all over this because, well, he hired a personal trainer and he's just dying to show us his Brad Pitt abs.

Snipes, we've heard, was very unhappy with this treatment of his franchise, and his loss of screen time to Reynolds and Biel. But if they've killed the Blade series off, they did him a favor. Snipes used to know how to act without wraparound shades, motorcycles and editing-room swordplay.

Without those Blade checks coming in, maybe he will hunt something other than vampires -- decent scripts.